A Tuscan retreat where ‘Literature is the primary value’

As the Baroness Beatrice Monti della Corte has found a secret of life: stories.

During the Santa Maddalena author’s residency at her vast estate in rural Tuscany, Monti hosted some of the most important storytellers of our time: Zadie Smith, Michael Cunningham, Colm Tóibín, Teju Cole, Sally Rooney, Olga Tokarczuk, Michael Ondaatje, Edmund White, and a few hundred others. While authors appreciate her quiet writing rooms overlooking the olive groves, her company is the main draw.

“The only things Beatrice doesn’t want to talk about,” Smith said, “are things that are boring.”

At 97, Monti is animated and unstoppable. She runs Santa Maddalena as her personal passion project, doesn’t accept applications and chooses writers based on her instincts, in consultation with her network of friends, publishers and other authors. Her taste, developed over a lifetime nourished by literature and art, is considered a benchmark, with several fellows going on to win the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer, the Booker and the Prix Goncourt.

At Santa Maddalena, “literature is the most important value,” says Cunningham, an annual visitor for 20 years. “There are times when I swear enough important work has been done in those rooms that they are saturated with something, the way smoke will eventually inhabit the walls of a place.”

Nestled among the orchard slopes outside Florence, Santa Maddalena resembles a typical Tuscan idyll: an ivy-covered farmhouse from the 16th century, a medieval stone watchtower and a swimming pool in the garden. But it’s also a worldly enclave: the pool is where actor Ralph Fiennes, a friend of Monti’s since filming “The English Patient” nearby, likes to sunbathe in the summer; the tower is where writer Bruce Chatwin spent months working on his books between travels; the farm – cleared of chicken habitation by Monti – was renovated in collaboration with the modernist architect Marco Zanuso.

“I had never seen anything so beautiful in my life,” Smith said of her first visit to the estate — a peaceful escape from the cyclone of fame following her publication of “White Teeth.” “I was such a parochial person. Part of Santa Maddalena understood that Willesden is not the center of the world,” she said of the northwest London suburb.

After her stay, Smith moved to Rome for two years, learned Italian and even adopted a pug identical to the dog found faithfully at Monti’s side. Since then, she has repeatedly returned to the writer’s residence.

On a recent afternoon, Monti was upstairs in her living room, recovering from a fall that left her with four stitches in her face but her spirit unscathed: “A fallen woman,” she deadpanned. Her eyes were the pale blue of sea glass, a silk scarf was tied around her neck, and she was surrounded by books and works of art from the illustrious talents that filled her life. Behind her lay a canvas by Antoni Tàpies; Santa Maddalena has become a home for writers, but is also home to quite a museum of modern art.

Her involvement in the art world began during her childhood on the island of Capri, she said, when she was the adolescent mascot of a creative milieu that included the most important Italian novelists of the time, associating with Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante and Curzio Malaparte. the latter of whom liked to ride his bike naked on the roof of his supervillain-looking house.

“There was a feeling of total freedom in Capri at that time,” she said. “That island made me eccentric for life.”

Her mother, an Armenian from Istanbul (then known as Constantinople), had died of typhus when Monti was six. Her father, an Italian aristocrat, had been away in Ethiopia for years – as a cultural attaché and later as a prisoner of war – and the child left, stranded with an unfeeling stepmother. “The writers and artists seemed more comfortable to me,” she said. Both would make her life easier.

In 1955 Monti founded the Galleria dell’Ariete in Milan. At the age of 25, she was one of the few female gallerists and quickly established herself as a vanguard with early exhibitions of New York’s new abstraction school – Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Mark Rothko – and of Italian painters and sculptors who era — Lucio Fontana, Pietro Consagra, Carla Accardi, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Enrico Castellani and Piero Manzoni (indelible for his literal looks of “Artist’s Shit”).

But for Monti, these earth-shaking artists were simply more of her interesting friends – friends who dropped by unannounced for dinner and now left her works of art, such as the monumental stone vulva, in her living room, for which she said she provided ‘the inspiration’.

The Baroness married Gregor von Rezzori, an acclaimed writer, in 1967, and together they discovered the dilapidated Tuscan farmhouse that became their home. She closed the gallery space in 1979, took on artistic roles at Condé Nast and Vanity Fair, and combined her work with world travel and country life with Grisha, as he was known to friends.

As a child grieving for her late mother, Monti was comforted with a litter of puppies, and she has surrounded herself with them ever since. When she lost Grisha in 1998, she erected a stone pyramid in his honor near his favorite writing spot in the garden – it stands about 6 feet tall, just like Grisha herself. He had begged her not to become an “ugly widow,” and she soon founded the Santa Maddalena Foundation, surrounding herself with writers in this grief.

For writers, the Santa Maddalena experience crystallizes at the table, where leisurely lunches and multi-course dinners are enjoyed together every day – with wine, if you will. On a warm autumn day, Monti and the guests in the residence sat around the table in the courtyard, where, over plates of broccoli pesto pasta, Parmesan cheese and prosciutto planks, fresh fruit and the latest tarts, the conversation turned from the translation of inner monologues to postcards from the German writer WG Sebald based on Monti’s adventures in Madrid with director Pedro Almodóvar.

“It is the Italian tradition to dine as a discussion,” noted German author Hans von Trotha over dessert. At Santa Maddalena, unhurried meals, served with Monti’s centuries of stories and the camaraderie of banter around the table, punctuate the working day. The retreat functions as a sleepaway camp for great writers, with ritualistic group meals and hours-long conversations that connect residents in what many describe as everlasting friendships.

After lunch, Swedish writer Karin Altenberg, a six-time fellow, gave a tour of Chatwin’s former tower room, where she currently worked. A curtained four-poster bed and an antique office chair – unfamiliar with terms like ‘ergonomic’ or ‘back support’ – shared the space with an apparently active colony of geckos. The room opened onto a sweeping view of the valley.

Santa Maddalena is “a place where creativity takes flight,” said Altenberg, a private home with quirks and surprises: Isabella Rossellini dropped by for dinner one evening! – strengthen the writing process.

“There are things in your room that can inspire you, or it could be the person you share the tower with, or even something annoying, like bats attacking you,” says Andrew Sean Greer, who directed Santa Maddalena for two years. and won the Pulitzer while living across the hall from Monti. He declined to comment further on the bats. Writers “either absolutely love Santa Maddalena, or they leave in a week,” he noted.

Writing is a portable art, and location can play a powerful role in informing even fiction. During the retreat, real-life characters and situations often find their way into writers’ stories.

“One day I decided that whatever happened in Santa Maddalena,” Tóibín said, “the events would become the first pages of my novel about Henry James.” And in fact, “The Master” opens with scenes drawn from his observations of Monti’s formal table manners, a trip to nearby Siena and an elderly Russian princess’s visit to the estate.

Santa Maddalena is not a writers’ residence in an institutional sense, Tóibín said.

“The paintings, the books, the presence of Beatrice” are a generous source of creativity for those who act in the imagination, he said, recalling an incident involving a hat on a bed – which for the superstitious in Italy was considered very bad luck was considered – where expelling the hex required a ceremony of interpersonal gonads.

Santa Maddalena has no endowments; the financial support comes mainly from the occasional sale of a work of art or an old jewel belonging to her mother. Monti is the current director of the foundation, the one-person advisory panel, the entertainment committee, the auction house fundraiser and the guiding light for the widow. “Now,” she said, “I’m a builder too.” Instead of slowing down as she approaches her 98th birthday, she’s building a three-story library in Santa Maddalena. “It’s a gamble,” she confided as she inspected the library’s cement foundations, nestled among bamboo and oak forests. “I have to finish it before I die.”

For Monti, a lifelong companion of creativity, the story continues. “There are old people who only think about the past, but it’s not like that here.” She leaned her walking stick on a rock. “You have to do things,” she reflected. “There is always a future, even if it is very small.”